Fall 2024

Ahuʻena: A Life In and Beyond the Archives

Assistant Professor of Hawaiʻi history, Dr. Noah Hanohano Dolim, recently gave a talk as part of the Center for Biographical Studies’ Brown Bag Biography series titled “Ahuʻena: A Life In and Beyond the Archives.” A replay of the talk can be found on YouTube at the link here. Below is a synopsis of Professor Dolim’s talk:

Emma Ahuʻena Taylor (1867-1937) was an aliʻi wahine who became a sought after historian and cultural expert during the early Territorial era of Hawaiʻi. Her life’s work is both exceptionally visible and unsurprisingly obscured by the interesting politics of Indigeneity, race, gender, and class. Additionally, her seemingly contradictory personal and professional relationships with white settler elites, which includes her marriage to the Territorial archivist, offers much to think about how Kānaka ʻŌiwi persisted under a new regime. The story of Emma Ahuʻena is a rich glimpse into the generation of aliʻi who were considered to be “links” and “bridges” between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more importantly, between the Hawaiian Kingdom and the Territory.

Noah Hanohano Dolim’s current project centers on aliʻi wahine political leadership outside of formal government institutions and their creation of sovereignties beyond the nation-state between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His research attends to the intersections of gender, race, settler colonialism, and imperialism. Noah is from Kunia, Oʻahu and has ancestral ties to Puna, Hawaiʻi.